Actually, it was just getting started.
The movie Trainwreck is a mildly raunchy sex comedy, starring the comedienne Amy Schumer, that was doing boffo box office in the summer of 2015. But it was also coming in for its share of criticism. The National Review’s film critic, Armond White, ripped the film for promoting sexual immorality and feminism. “Schumer disguises a noxious cultural agenda as personal fiat,” he wrote. “She’s a comedy demagogue who okays modern misbehavior yet blatantly revels in PC notions about feminism, abortion, and other hot-button topics.”
A young writer for Fox News chimed in: “As a young woman, yes, even younger than Schumer, all this attention and praise for raunchy behavior bothers me.”
Those were all people who had bigger audiences than John Russell Houser, fifty-nine, with a history of bipolar disorder and other mental-health issues. Originally from Georgia and most recently from Alabama, he had moved to Lafayette, Louisiana, in early July and taken up residence at a Motel 6 near the freeway.
In his room, he scribbled his “random” thoughts about the moral state of America in his journal:
America is a filth farm. America is no longer America, i.e., all liberal political measures are approved without a vote of the people. These are the measures that lack logic, morality, or financial responsibility. It is this that boils the blood of the citizens, [and] which causes them to dig in their heals. If you have not stood against filth, you are now a soft target.
If the founders of this nation could have seen what the US would become, they would say, “Let us destroy it.”
America is in the middle of celebrating filth, and as such they are the enemy. Those who have not stood are equally culpable.
Soft targets are everywhere.
I have hidden nothing and have hated the US for at least 30 years. It will soon be every man for himself. A global rearrangement comes soon.
America is in the business of
1—making whores and prostitutes of girls and women.
2—making niggers of black people
3—breaking up families that could have survived in a society of decency
4—making sexual deviants (homosexuals) of normal people
5—censoring people who love what is normal
6—creating division amongst people that could have lived in harmony based on logic (affirmative action)
America as a whole is now the enemy. All soft targets included.
Nowhere in the US is it safe.
Houser had a long online history of similar ravings. Most of his postings indicate his obsession with “the power of the lone wolf,” a reference to terrorist attacks carried out by solo operators unconnected to any organization. It is a modality favored by far-right extremists. In 2005 he registered to attend a conference led by the former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, and later praised Duke in his online comments. He also had a penchant for praising Adolf Hitler, penning lines such as “Hitler is loved for the results of his pragmatism.”
Like Jim David Adkisson, Honser also loved to hate on liberals: “Liberals are in the last stage of killing the golden goose, moral people who pay their bills, most notably, the white MAN.”
Once settled in Louisiana, Houser appears to have tried scoping out his “soft target”—the Grand 16 movie theater in Lafayette. He showed up at the theater a couple of times in disguises, once dressed as a woman, and behaving “erratically.”
On July 23, he showed up ten minutes late for the 7:10 showing of Trainwreck and took a seat in the second-to-last row. He had a .40-caliber handgun in his pants pocket and two ten-round magazines. About ten minutes after he had arrived, he stood, pulled the gun from his pocket, and shot the two people sitting directly in front of him. Then he began walking down the stairway aisle, shooting people in their seats and as they fled. He reloaded once, firing in all at least thirteen rounds.
When the shooting subsided, Houser attempted to return to his car by mingling with panicked patrons. But then he himself panicked when police arrived with lights and sirens blazing, and he ran back inside, firing again randomly at patrons as he did so. Finally he stopped, put the gun in his mouth, and fired a last shot.
Houser killed two women and wounded nine people. The injuries ranged in severity from light to life-altering, and the victims ranged in age from teenagers to women and men in their sixties. One of the victims suffered four gunshot wounds.
The news of the mass shooting hit the networks that night. Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, anchoring the news desk that evening, pondered the breaking story: “Any reason to believe there might be a connection to ISIS, or radical Islam, or terror as we understand it in this country?”
When investigators got to Houser’s Motel 6 room, they found wigs and dresses and makeup for disguises. It looked as though he had planned to escape.
They also found his journal. It didn’t explain precisely why he decided to target a theater showing Trainwreck, but the general direction of his thinking was easy to discern. It isn’t hard to guess why he chose a theater showing that movie as a “soft target,” since he likely figured the audience would be full of liberals and women of questionable moral values.
Investigators also noted that Houser had penned some thoughts on Dylann Roof, whom in one note he called “good but green.”
“Had Dylan Roof reached political maturity he would have seen the word is not nigger, but liberal,” Houser wrote, an eerie echo of Adkisson’s views. “But thank you for the wake up call Dylann.”
Ladies and Gentlemen: In American public life there is an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia. Welcome to Alternative America—Alt-America, for short.
Alt-America is an alternative universe that has a powerful resemblance to our own, except that it’s a completely different America, the nation its residents have concocted and reconfigured in their imaginations. It is not the America where the rest of us live. In this other America, suppositions take the place of facts, and conspiracy theories become concrete realities. Its citizens live alongside us in our universe, but their perception of that universe places them in a different world altogether, one scarcely recognizable to those outside it.
In Alt-America:
•Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya who conspired with a global elite and terrorist radicals to impose sharia law on America.
•Obama, Hillary Clinton, and most mainstream politicians are simultaneously the corrupt pawns of a nefarious New World Order (NWO) that seeks to impose a global government that will turn the world’s population into their slaves.
•Global climate change is a hoax concocted by the NWO and environmentalist elites who want to impose massive regulatory regimes on businesses and force ordinary Americans out of public lands.
•These same global elites want to gut the Second Amendment so that Americans’ guns can be confiscated and the populace disarmed, all in the name of public safety, but really for the purpose of imposing its tyrannical dictatorship.
•The current American government is actually an illegal and unconstitutional entity that seized control of the United States in the 1930s and, through its corrupt Federal Reserve Bank, controls the nation’s fiat currency for its own nefarious ends.
•Prejudice and oppression against white people now is